Dr Roger Johnson, Fellow of Birkbeck College and Emeritus Reader in Computer Science, reflects on the world’s first stored program computer as created and demonstrated by Professor Andrew Booth and Kathleen Booth (née Britten) 75 years ago.

Kathleen Booth, Miss Xenia Sweeting and Andrew Booth in the lab during the construction of the ARC.

At the heart of the modern computer is a memory that holds both the program to be run and the data to be processed. The first successful demonstration of the modern computer was by two members of staff from Birkbeck College: Andrew and Kathleen Booth.

Starting in the late summer of 1947, they designed and then built a computer which they called ARC (Automatic Relay Computer). The first public demonstration of the computer was on May 12th 1948 – exactly 75 years ago.

Kathleen Booth and Xenia Sweeting working on ARC.

Kathleen and Andrew Booth shared the task of building the computer helped by one research assistant, Xenia Sweeting.

In accounts of her work, Kathleen Booth, who wrote the first program, recounted: “We demonstrated the generation and printing of a table of the squares of the natural numbers 0-255 in the scale of 10”.

Kathleen Booth at the keyboard preparing a program for ARC

Technically, the computer’s memory was a brass drum with an oxide coating which could store in total 256 words each of 21 bits revolving at 3000 revolutions per minute. By modern standards, this is absolutely tiny, but was significant for the time. The computer was also very slow by today’s standards because the logic of the computer was built using relays.

Andrew Booth working on the selenium diode function table of ARC

However, from this first basic computer have developed the massively powerful modern computers which can run programs of a complexity which few even dreamt of in those early days.

Further Information:

• Research in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems
• Andrew and Kathleen Booth Memorial Lecture
• BEI: Computer Science and Information Systems
• BEI: School

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

The University of London’s first PhD recipient of any gender, Lillian Penson went on to forge a stellar career in higher education that smashed gender stereotypes, being the first female professor of history and first female university vice-chancellor in the UK. She spoke eloquently on the need to offer university education for “virtually all comers” with no restriction based on religion, race or sex.

Born in Islington in 1896, Penson was a brilliant student of history at “The Birkbeck”. After a stint at the wartime Ministry of National Service and in the war trade intelligence department, Penson returned to her studies and completed her PhD. Only one-fifth of history PhD students were female at the time. She was a lecturer at Birkbeck for nine years until she left for a Chair in Modern History at Bedford College for Women.

Her leadership responsibilities in education expanded from managing the history department at Bedford College to the top position of Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, the first woman in that post. She was appointed a DBE in 1951.

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Isaac is heralded as one of the greatest of the war poets, reflecting on the horrors of conflict through art and poetry. As an art student at Birkbeck, Isaac won the College’s Mason Prize; though his art career was brought to an abrupt ending when he was killed at the age of twenty-seven while serving in the First World War.

From the trenches on 28 March 1918, just four days before his death, he reflected that “during our little interlude of rest from the line I managed to do a bit of sketching – somebody had colours – and they werent [sic] so bad. I don’t think I have forgotten my art after all.”

Isaac left school at the age of fourteen years but went on to study at Birkbeck in the evenings. Today, he is known for his posthumously published war poems. In one, entitled Dead Man’s Dump, Rosenberg describes, “The wheels lurched over sprawling dead…their bones crunched. They lie there huddled, friend and foemen…Man born of man and born of woman, And shells go crying over them, From night till night and now.”

In the foreword to these poems, fellow English war poet and soldier, Siegfried Sassoon noted how Rosenberg’s poems encapsulated the “hateful and repellent, unforgettable and inescapable” realities of life in the frontlines.

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Born into a Quaker family in North Yorkshire, George trained as a doctor at Edinburgh and founded the London Mechanics Institute in 1823, when thousands gathered on the Strand to hear his ground-breaking speech on “the universal blessings of knowledge.”

His interest in the education of working men started when he wanted a particular machine to be made for his classes in natural philosophy and chemistry which he taught at the Anderson Institution, Glasgow in 1799. At the institution, he started a course of lectures on science, to which artisans were admitted for a low fee.

A pioneer in adult education, George had been struck by the ignorance of the basics of engineering and by the hunger for knowledge from workmen at a workshop visit and promptly opened his classes to mechanics, offering classes on Saturday evenings.

The success of the London institution led to the establishment of similar vocational training schools all over Britain, some of which developed into technical colleges.

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Helen was Birkbeck’s first female professor and a prominent English botanist. In 1909 she became Head of the Botany Department at Birkbeck and gained her professorship in 1921.

She became the first woman to wear the insignia of a Military Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1918 and was transferred to become Commandant of the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) later that year. In 1919, Helen was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Helen’s professionalism helped to change male attitudes towards women in the armed forces and she would go on to play a pivotal role in forming the Emergency Services, an organisation established to train female officers. Helen was appointed Director of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s branch of the British Army in 1938 and held the position until her retirement from military service in 1941.

She is commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque at Flat 93, Bedford Court Mansions in Bloomsbury – her London home for almost 50 years.